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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Droid Day Four; We Have a Map For That

I didn’t get to spend a lot of time playing with my Droid today so I don’t have any technical wisdom to share. Instead I can point you to a worthwhile article by Harry McCracken who discusses the new Verizon commercials and AT&T efforts to stop Verizon for what they say are false claims. Check out…

Having better coverage is huge. I love my iTouch and my two year Verizon contract just expired. It would have been natural for me to go for an iPhone.

My decision to get a Droid instead of an iPhone was based completely on my satisfaction with the Verizon network and stories of dropped signals from my friends using AT&T. Even without the stories the 3G maps don’t lie.

The folks at Verizon know this and are going to take full advantage during this Christmas season with commercials like the following.

4 Comments:

We had Cingular, which later became AT&T, but going to school in an area where AT&T's coverage is spotty at best made us all worried. In Nov 2007 we started researching, and found out 2 very interesting things.

1) VZW had full service in the are of and around the university. Major plus.

2) Employees of the university get an EPP discount of 20% on plans. Even bigger plus.

We never looked back. And, to be hones, are glad we haven't. AT&T coverage was so bad that upon entering 90% of buildings in the phone, not to mention 3 different dead zones commuting to the university, the phones would lose signal. never failed, on a daily basis. To make it worse, my phone at the time (Motorola V551, upgraded to the V557 later on) would continuously and actively keep looking for a signal that it knew was there - and thus would kill the batter. On days I went to school, my battery life from charge to charge was roughly 1.5 days. over the weekend, I'd get 3 days continuously, and at breaks I'd get 5-7 days on a single charge. naturally, this was prior to having data plans and such, but still, to have the battery die like that without data was extremely frustrating.

The new DROID does have some of its own issues - thankfully the phone itself is intact, doesn't seem to have been previously played with, and the battery cover and slide out KB are tight - but the battery is killed in less than a day every day. Still, it is an improvement in terms of everything it offers, and my calling, texting, navigating, email-checking, and tweeting are flawless. I have had a single error in ~6 days of usage.

A couple things you could do to extend battery life. Unless you always have to have an excellent signal, even when the phone is standby, you could tell it to stick to 2G, not 3G. That saves some power. Another one (I don't have a droid, I have a Samsung Galaxy), only turning on GPS, WIFI, and auto sync, when you want or need it.